How to Boost Wellness with Conscious Breathing | Wim Hof's Technique in 22 Minutes

What is better, nasal breathing or mouth breathing? I think it is nasal breathing. It's easier because your nitrous oxide is going within, it's included. That dilates the veins. Your body becomes more relaxed and the blood flow goes better through your system. When you do mouth breathing, it's like, ah, ah, ah, something is going on. The adrenaline shoots, the constriction of your veins is there. So you are faster and you are in a fight mode. We don't feel that necessarily. Necessarily directly, but in long-term, mouth breathing instead of conscious nasal breathing makes your body more stressful. So I advise during the day more nasal breathing. Conscious nasal breathing is amazing what it does. You get more peace inside, more flow, more opening up of all the vessels inside. It's still 100,000 kilometers we are talking about. That's the vascular system. And that is being influenced by the nitrous oxide, which comes included when you do nasal breathing. It stops at the moment when you do mouth breathing. And another thing is, don't go too far with it all. Just take it easy. As much as that.

Need motivation?

Watch the top 10 with Believe Nation.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I watch these videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too. It's like your morning coffee, but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity. So here is a challenge for you. Try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days, and let's find out together if they help you do great things too. If you're in, leave a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can celebrate with you. So today, let's learn from one of the best, Wim Hof, and our take on his top 10 rules of success. Believe. Rule number 2 is help others.

What is the mind? Is it ego or legal? Are you playful or are you very serious? You know, you should be serious about exercising once a day, very intensive. And I have the ego suffer. You know, I do 5 minutes plank now. I go into the icy water every day. I love it. I love it. You have to die once a day. You go through your ego, through your conditioning. Your conditioning is only showing, hey, I got a framework. This is the way it looks like. If you want to know more, you got to go through me and exercise more. And push more, push for more. You know how you push more for more? By helping others. By having purpose in your life. And to bring good to the world, to the nature. That's your real neurological nature. That surpasses the ego.

Rule number 3 is live your life to the fullest.

What is the biggest lesson Mother Nature has given to me? The biggest. To live life 100%, not 99%, 100%. And to go for the right to understand it all. That is the biggest lesson. The biggest lesson is that we are very temporarily in life. We will be forgotten, possibly. Not me, I'm a very historic figure and all that. No, I want to be aware of what is the soul. Mother Nature is there witnessing and looking what we are doing with our lives. Let me tell you, I go to the depths, I go to the heights, I go to all sides.

Rule number 4 is push through the cold.

What to do when winter comes and the motivation is not there to go into the cold? In the summer it's really nice, it's a nice sunshine, you go out. It's not so cold, but when it is cold, going into the deeper cold, that's quite difficult. And I can understand that. But I tell you, right in the winter, you get the most of profit. It's a— you get the most of result by doing this. The cold trains your immune system to be boosted. And that's what you need to get no flu, no colds, no inflammation, depression, all that is not going to happen. How that physiologically works is a whole book. The thing is, the result of going into the winter and having your motivation, your motivation should be, hey, I want to tackle the flu, the cold, the depression in the winter. Can I do it? Yes. What do you got to do? Just take the damn cold shower. I'm sorry. Damn cold shower. It's a heavenly cold shower. It's amazing. It's amazing. It's amazing. I make of every winter a summer. Behave as if you are in the summer. Think about that. That is the power of your mind being able to switch your body into a powerful being. Make of your winter a summer. That should be your motivation. Wow, amazing exercises. Not only physical, absolutely the mind. The sky was not the limit, the mind it is. You can take it on this winter. Let's go.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight our favorite lessons from the video that will inspire you to remember what you learned today and actually apply them. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there. Rule number 5 is take control of your life.

What was your life like before you became the Iceman?

And actually, I was a father of 4 kids and bringing them up alone because my wife accidented in '95.

So that kind of adversity and sadness maybe motivated you to—

Oh yes.

Inspire yourself in the same way a lot of people who do—

Yes, sadness is a deep trigger. Where I got peace was in these breathing exercises. Swimming outside in the cold. The cold is merciless but righteous as well. All the people say, you know, you cannot steer life, you cannot do this, and yeah, it's part of life, and it's destiny, and it is fate. Fuck fate, and fuck destiny, and all that. No, this time we learn to control our happiness, health, and strength. And that's not philosophical or sectarian, it's chemistry.

Rule number 6 is clear your mind.

What do I mean with belief? Affirmations, God, the trees, my neighbor, my wife, my children. A clear mind. That's what I believe in. I want to ride my bicycle. I want to Just clear-minded. No clouds in my mind. Just being clear, clear-minded, and sing. Sing and bring. To have clarity in your mind is to have no hindrances in the radiance of our brain. And that is divine. That's brilliant. That's belief. I believe that we are all born to have a great day every day. Shine.

Rule number 7 is face your fears.

Do I ever feel fear? Yes. Fear is a word. Fear is a reality. And fear is a thing you learn to handle. And once you learn to handle the fear, you go to the fear instead of fear comes to you. Like the cold, I go to the cold. That's why I don't get cold. I go to the fear. That's why fear doesn't come to me. I learn to handle fear. I challenge myself mentally, physically, emotionally in many, many ways. And then the fear that not being able to do something is not there because I'm prepared. You can prepare yourself toward anything. That's the way we are built. We are built to be able to handle a fear before it's coming to us. We learn about this complex psychic mechanism called fear, how to handle it by challenging our bodies and mind. It's all there. Think about it. So do I have fear? No. I go to that before it happens to me. Before fear comes in, I already handle it. I get my goals and I make the fear go away. I'm determined to realize my goal and there is no space for fear. And I know fear is there all the time, but not in my course. That's the way we are built. So a fearless state of being is who we are in the depth of ourselves, but we have to retrieve it.

Rule number 8 is maintain your health.

How important is it to maintain health? It's not only important, it's our ability, our response ability. We are able to respond to stresses that deregulates our systems to backseal viruses, bacteria, emotional stress, any stress. How important is it? Mental health, physical health. Without that, you don't have the temple. And it's your temple to make it shiny, to make it beautiful with a beautiful garden.

Rule number 9 is tap into your emotions.

Dolphins have a brain more than twice as as big as ours, but they are not building bridges and technology and all. No, they use it for echo. A lot is echo. And they are very— yeah, there is a lot of emotion going on with dolphins. So that is emotion. And that the biggest part of our brain is actually our emotion. I mean, what are thoughts when you are in love? It's nothing. It's pathetic. What is death when you are having all the money in the world and power and this and that? It's nothing. So it's much bigger than our thinking brain by which we thought we can control our emotions, but it is not. Emotions happen. Now, when emotions are disturbed, are we able to tap into the emotions and cleanse them from the wrong stress inflicted by a disruptive situation like death or like a marriage broken, divorce, or anything like that? Anybody can understand that. And if we go back, To what you said, Jordan, the old story of the woman or the mama who lifts up a car because her child is underneath is tapping into that power of the emotion. Only at that time, she is not thinking. She is not blocked in her thinking loops. She goes past. And do we have now found a way to tap into that emotional brain, which is almost the rest of ours? So we got a thinking brain, 16%, that is able to control. Then we are controlled by emotions, the limbic system. And then we have a reptilian, the brainstem, the oldest. And that is more into breathing. The breathing, fight, flight, food. Yeah. To be very basic, that it is. And those things are very strong. It drives men and women. It's what it is. But emotions is bigger. Is bigger. We can override the brainstem. We can override even death when we see our child underneath a car. Or amidst the traffic, we go. There's no thinking. Fear is gone. But we should not need— we should not need triggers like that to make use of that power to go within that 100% of our brain. And now we have shown how to do it. And of course, it took steps to do it. Because a stubborn understanding of what we can do, even scientifically stated, and to overthrow that, that is overthrowing and shifting the whole paradigm, the whole narrative told us by schools, doctors, the systems, the governments. You can only do so much and that's it. That's the way you're going to be schooled. And I say, That is nonsense. What is really sense is to be able to process your hurt when you are in emotional agony because of divorces, death, you lost your job, you have no money suddenly anymore after having millions and or whatever reason. It affects us. And that affects our deeper brain in which we never knew how to go within and to rectify, to process, to repair, to heal our hurt. We never had it. And now we have it. First, I showed in Hanover in the best brain scans of the world How to activate willfully, willfully 100% neural activity in the brain as if the people were on LSD. If you see LSD, the whole brain is in awe. This neural discharge is everywhere. It's like a disco. Now, if you do these breathing techniques I'm teaching, and these are not shallow breathing techniques, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. No, when you go into the cold, you do— it's like life comes in because you need it, life force to oppose the cold. In the cold, you cannot say, ah, that's cold and easy does it. Doesn't work because you go into an overdrive of having no control anymore. So I learned to cultivate that breathing by going into the cold so many times that I saw the effects, that I cultivated it and replicated the power activated through that breathing within that is able to oppose the stress of the cold. Now to do it without the cold.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is embrace the power of your mind. Explain the mission. Why are you doing this? Why it's so important to you? It's not just about setting the world records, but why do you do this?

Yes, as I said, I did a lot of stuff outside in nature, Because I felt this disconnection from nature inside, from the soul itself. Soul is not able to express, and you can see it in the world full of depression and autoimmune diseases, cancer, all those things, and anxiety. So nobody knows actually, it's because of the disconnection of nature. So resulted in me an awkward feeling. I don't know what there is, but there There is more than meets the eye. I'm going into a soul search, and that brought me to all kinds of traditions, esoteric disciplines, languages, religions, debates about philosophies, cultures, anything, you know. But in the end, it didn't connect with me. That's when the cold water came in, and the cold water is merciless but righteous. Okay, so boom, hey, you gotta be there, right? About little by little, you begin to wake up to that. What you feel inside is beginning to wake up. A real primordial disconnection is beginning to connect to your consciousness, brain-body connection. And now, after doing 26 of those world records, about numerous more challenges I got in contact with scientists, and then it came about that I was awakening, stimulating, influencing systems within the body they thought of not being able to be influenced or connected with for humans. They thought, humans cannot tap in, it's an autonomic nervous system, it's an autonomic process. Us, outside of our will. But brain-body connection, remember connection? Yeah, there it is. And now I'm able to connect, enter, and make the difference. And that's what I did in the studies.

Wim's mission is to use his body as a laboratory to revolutionize our understanding of physiology. In 2011, he was injected with a bacterial endotoxin in an experiment that challenged our understanding of the nervous system. In normal humans, the injection should cause a strong immune response, leading to fever, chills, and headaches, but not in Wim. It appeared that he was somehow able to suppress his immune response by making his body secrete adrenaline, suggesting that his method can allow us to influence our immune system at will. Scientists thought he might just be a freak of nature, so to further prove this theory, They performed the same experiment on 12 subjects Wim had trained in Poland, and the same thing happened.

Proof you only get after comparative study with groups. So I took on a full group. I trained them 4 days to get into the autonomic nervous system and all those things, and they got administered with the bacteria. And as well, all within a quarter of an hour entering into those systems. And now we are getting somewhere. The power of the mind. Yeah, we are dealing in modern-day society. We can go to the moon, we can go to Mars and everywhere, but we cannot tap into the depth of ourselves and make the difference with the depression depression, anxiety, fear, trauma, PTSD, anything. We've been saying now to 5 million Spartans out there, get out of your comfort zone, get uncomfortable. If the weather's bad, go outside and do a workout in the bad weather.

Yeah, right.

We're saying to the children, get uncomfortable. And so we're not, we're not crazy. Actually, you go and get into real comfort zone. Because the real comfort is being activated through the natural elements. First you get through this little shivering of, oh, it's outside, but then at a certain moment it begins to adapt from the deep inside, begins to adapt to the environment, the environmental stress, and you feel alive, good, alive, you see.

For 10 more amazing rules from Andrew Huberman, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

The meditation is very simple. It's one that anyone can perform. What you would want to do is set a timer for about 13 minutes. I don't think it has to be exactly 13 minutes, but since that's what they included in the study, you would set a timer for 13 minutes. You would sit or lie